"The Most Haunted Hotel in Ireland"-- HOKUM (2026) Review

HOKUM 2026. A Team Thrives/Image Nation Abu Dhabi FZ/Cweature Features/Spooky Pictures/Tailored Films/Fis Eireann-Screen Ireland Co-Production, distributed by Neon International. Ireland-United Arab Emirate . 1 hour 47 minutes, Aspect Ratio 2.39:1. Director & Screenplay: Damian McCarthy. Cinematography: Colm Hogan. Production Designer: Til Frohlich. Costume Designer: Lara Campbell. Music: Joseph Bishara. Sound Designer: Steve Fanagan. Makeup Designer: Niam O’Loan. 

CAST: Adam Scott (Ohm Bauman), Florence Ordesh (Fiona), David Wilmot (Jerry), Peter Coonan (Mal, the Desk Clerk), Michael Patric (Fergal, the Groundskeeper), Will O’Connell (Alby the Belloboy/Jack the Jackass), Austin Amelio (Conquistador), Ezra Carlisle (Conquistador’s Boy Companion), Brendan Conroy (Cob, the Old Man), Mallory Adams (Ohm’s Mother), Sioux Carroll (The Witch).

In the accompanying Damian McCarthy interview, he describes Hokum as a movie about Ireland’s “worst haunted hotel,” with a particularly terrifying honeymoon suite. It is a very accurate description, but of course his third feature film is much more than that. Not that Hokum deviates much from classic horror film formulae: it is a conscious riff on Stephen King in his ‘70s mode of updating Universal-style old horror cinema motifs— a psychologically conflicted writer visiting a haunted/cursed location that might have a personal connection— with dollops of Irish folk horror. 

Ohm Bauman, an Irish American writer, played by Adam Scott with the requisite air of mundane callousness and just-visible-below-the-skin internal turmoil, currently working on the final installment of his Conquistador Trilogy of historical novels, visits a secluded hotel called Bilberry Woods to scatter the ashes of his parents. It appears that they had stayed in the hotel’s honeymoon suite following their marriage. The hotel comes with a creepy folk-horror mythology about Callieach (or the Hag of Beara), a witch supposed to, according to this film, cuff and chain children, dragging them into the underworld. Bauman is cynical and abrasive and has a nicely rendered encounter with the hotel’s Bellboy (Will O’Connell) who pushes all the wrong buttons in the writer (including the ultimate no-no, “I am an aspiring writer myself and I have a manuscript that I want to show you…”) and gets physically abused as a result.  

It turns out Bauman is seriously depressed and, while creatively productive, has lost faith in humanity. He spells out the intended denouement of his latest novel to Fiona (Florence Ordesh), a female staff member who stands up to him and calls his bluff, a pitch-dark, feel-bad ending that she immediately rejects. He also reluctantly befriends Jerry (David Wilmot), an aging counter-culture backwoods type who drinks goat milk spiked by magic mushroom elixir, allegedly enabling him to pick up signals from the underworld.

 

At this point, something drastic happens to the protagonist, pushing the whole picture slightly askew and makes the viewers question the verity of what they are about to follow. Fortunately, Director McCarthy manages to avoid relying on tiresome editorial tricks that call attention to unreliability of the narrator and keeps the proceedings just conventional and predictable enough to stabilize the viewer’s orientation. This aspect of the film, Bauman’s subjective perspective in contradistinction to the “real” supernatural things happening, is handled particularly well by McCarthy. He provides a satisfactory resolution that shows the protagonist having been positively transformed from his experience, without necessarily shutting down multiple possibilities of interpretation regarding the question of “what really happened?”   

There are some cliched plot developments and characterizations, most notably the source of Bauman’s guilt involving his parent’s deaths, but these points are never belabored to the point of distracting the viewer. Scott does an excellent job of keeping the viewers engaged, considering that his Bauman is an unlikable, self-possessed ass, working well with local Irish actors playing characters designed a bit like board game personages but still effective. The standout for me was the interaction between Bauman and Alby the Bellboy, sarcastically humorous but genuinely cringe-inducing in its combination of awkwardness and malice, culminating in a rather nice payoff at the end.   

Interspersed with the reasonably well worked out plot are McCarthy’s signature touches, such as his love for the quirky, the slightly ridiculous and the portentously antique— a cord-pulled servant bell that looks positively ancient and an elaborately crafted, sinister-looking angel-motif alarm clock, for instance, play significant functional roles throughout the film. He pulls out all the stops in the middle part when Bauman must deal with the Honeymoon Suite itself, seemingly connected to the underworld through a dumb waiter, the key to unlocking his confinement tantalizingly out of reach for him. 

The interesting spatial arrangements of his previous films, always subtly off-kilter and artificial like an old fin-de-siecle mechanical toy, are also present here, substantially enhanced by Colm Hogan’s widescreen cinematography and the subdued but effective production designs supervised by Til Frohlich. It is to McCarthy’s credit that the film, although largely confined to several rooms of the hotel in terms of settings, never feels claustrophobic except when such feelings are explicitly called for. The visual scheme of Hokum is otherwise almost rigorously classical, the events and visuals presented on the precise scale of a ‘70s-style regional horror film: no elaborate CGI demons, no overtly absurdist imagery that references other, more famous horror films. The only exception is Bauman’s hallucination (which is given a sort of rational explanation at the end, natch) of a children’s show character, Jack the Jackass, indeed a nightmare fuel and far scarier than the witch, supposedly the film’s main supernatural bogey. 

  

Oddity has its committed supporters and is a rollicking fun of its own, but in my view Hokum has a more precise take on the psychological and moral conflicts of the protagonist and presents an overall more thoughtful, positive understanding of human weaknesses and foibles than its predecessor. It is also one darn spooky ride, that earns its stripes fair and square: I heartily endorse the star Scott’s call to “watch Hokum in the theater, with a fellow group of paying audience.”